


Taste

by hungrytiger



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Vampire, F/M, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-22
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-07 11:52:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hungrytiger/pseuds/hungrytiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can taste blood, but you can't taste much else. And blood? Is pretty sick to taste. A What-if story, with vampires in the Naruto Manga. Shika/Ino leanings</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It's something they don't tell you about in the stories, or in their advertising little spiels, if the one who turned you was so nice as to wait for your consent. You can taste blood, but you can't taste much else. And blood? Is pretty sick to taste.

So, when Shikaramu has his mouth around her neck, he isn't enjoying it at all. But she starts- not breathing. She, like him is no longer alive quite- but moving, heart beating, some indefinable something tells him this person is still there, and he is relieved. Someone is not leaving him before their time.

He drags her out of the fighting by her arms, careful to keep his head ducked low. Damned miscalculation, that's all the whole fucked up mission was, and it had cost Konoha two of his genin, and one of hers and for Ino… He glanced over the face, noting the fading bruise that might have become a shattered cheekbone in better circumstances and the now scar less chin that showed no memory of their six year old misadventure with a kunai. For Ino, this battle had cost her her life.

Above him a horse voice calls out, sounding young and scared, too young and too scared to have possibly been the victor of a ninja battle. Yet that was what it was.

"Sensei? Sensei!"

"Here, Eji-kun," he calls back, picking out his student's Hyuuga-white eyes easily amongst the dark shadows of leaves. "Where are the others?"

Eji drops to the forest floor and takes a few cautious steps towards him, but with eyes on the prone figure behind him.

"Yamanaka-sensei? I-is that-? Does she need a m-medic? She's not…"

"No," he says, "She'll be fine. The others?"

"S-settng the bodies on fire. N-no trace, right?"

He could count the bodies as disposed of then, and assume the rest of their teams were realatively unharmed. On the one hand, their efficiency was really too bad. The corpses would have been easy feeding. If she needed feeding. He didn't remember exactly when he grew so hungry he had been desperate enough to try. But then, he didn't have anyone to guide his way through this changed existence and Ino would have him. There was other ways to get feed the hungry and it at least showed their students listened to them everyone in awhile. From the back of his numbed mind a voice whispers this is a good thing, something to celebrate in different circumstances other than these.

There is nothing to celebrate in this circumstance.

"Can you carry your teammates? Their…bodies, I mean," he asks his student. Really he should be the one carrying any dead students, but there's too many and he can't leave yet, not when she had to be his main concern.

Eji-kun nods unhappily and asks for further instructions. He tells him to take the teams back to Konoha. Those alive and dead alike must go back. Something in these instructions is enough to set Eji-kun off, and he starts crying. Shikaramu is forced to threaten with a formal reprimand before the boy stops. But he doesn't stop for long because then Shikamaru asks who were the students who died and that sets Eji-kun off all over again.

"Asuma."

This time Shikamaru doesn't ask the boy to stop. Asuma was Eji's Chouji, and Asuma is one more dead he must bring back to Kurenai, who has just now outlived both husband and son. Eji-kun manages to stutter out the other expected names of their dead and raises a sleeve to wipe at his eyes.

"Go," Shikamaru tells him and settles down to wait for Ino. Not long now, an hour, maybe two, and she can thank him for saving her-or, more probably, scream at him for ruining her life. He isn't even sure which he would prefer.

 

He listens to the rustle of genins' not-quite-silent footfalls across forest ground, coming from a little northeast of him, and then to animals and to the wind and then finally, to the smallest sound of all: Ino gasps.

He reaches out a hand to grip her shoulder, and pushes her back down.

"Ino."

Her name is all he manages to choke out. He hadn't- hadn't been ,sure, that this would work. Turning a person was something he'd never done before. A first time for everything then. But she doesn't seem to need any more words because she reaches up to touch his face above hers.

Her touch is gentle, careful as it traces down his check and across his smile. It is not, he quickly discovers though, an affectionate touch.

"Shikamaru. Shikamaru, you're injured. I-I think you might be bleeding internally."

His hand finds hers and stills its passage across his face. When he moves his lips, he can feel the pads of her fingers brush against them. It occurs to him that this is rather intimate. The world has gone very still.

"Why do you say that?"

"Th-there's blood stained on your teeth. Are your gums bleeding? Or-"

Or has he been drinking blood? Why, yes, Ino. Yours, he thinks. He doesn't say that though, doesn't say anything at all, unsure of how to explain. It's not like Hidan (if it was Hidan. That's just his working theory for how the hell he ended up like this.) or anybody, really, explained to him. How do you tell someone they've joined the ranks of the not-dead? (The undead? Did that sound better?)

"Troublesome," he mutters to himself, and Ino stills at his all-too-common response.

"You aren't…hurt, then?" she asks.

"No."

She grimaces at him and makes a show of running her tongue over her teeth. Obediently, he runs his own tongue along the edge of his teeth, tastes blood, and makes a grab for their water canteen. He swish-and-spits; the water comes out pink. Hopefully, his mouth is cleaner because somehow he thinks the truth is going to be hard enough to take without evidence staring Ino in the face like that. And speaking of the truth…

"Ino," he says. "I did something. Something you may not like."

"Shikamaru," she says slowly, looking around. "Where are my students? Where are yours?"

He sighs. " Ino-"

"They aren't dead, are they?" She jerks up into a seated position, eyes wild. "Tell me they aren't!"

"No. Well, some, but Ino-"

She crumples forward, collapsing in on herself, clenching fists tight enough to draw blood. He can smell it in the air, metallic and sharp. The only sound is her sucking on air.

"Ino-"

Nothing.

"Ino. They aren't the only ones who died."

This gets her attention, drawing up her eyes, wet and large and fearful.

"Who?"

Her voice is horse as if she has been crying for hours instead of not at all. His hand brushes back hair to cradle her head against his palm. He could feel blood pounding through, under the skin, right where the skull joined the neck. Not dead, not dead, not dead every pulse beat seemed to sing. She was not leaving him yet.

"You."


	2. Shoegi Lessons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the fall out of turning Ino into something like him, Shikamaru teaches Ino to play Shoegi and contemplates eternity. Written for Ishime on Livejournal.

The weeks after...after most their students die...shutter by. Shikamaru finds, these days, he remembers those days only in fractured pieces, and wishes he remembered them not at all. But hey, he's apparently going to live forever, so maybe the years will pile on and he really will forget. 

Vampirism. Even now the word feels strange on his tongue.

Things move to rearrange themselves into a new normal. Ino stays at his house most nights; this leads their little gang of friends to all believe they're "an item now," as Sakura puts it. Ino's friend gets a funny look on her face when she says it, like its not quite as happy of news as it should be. Still, Ino doesn't correct them and neither does he. He wants- but he isn't sure Ino wants that, and so he waits. They both have the time now, since he brought her and not any of their students back from death. This is what Ino doesn't understand the most- or so she says. Why her; why not them?

He knows it would be troubling to her to tell her it has always been her. It always would be now. So he doesn't tell her anything at all. 

Still every night he finds her in his apartment. When he was first turned (when he died and woke up on a battle field alone among the corpses), it scared him, this lack of sleep. Ino claimed it was only lonely, and asked him to teach her Shogi to pass the time.

In the day she doesn't do much either. Every mission she's offered is turned down, and she has refused to go back to her one remaining student since learning of the others' deaths. Periodically, that last one student loiters in the alleyway below Shikamaru's apartment complex, but if he's ever exchanged words with his sensei, Shikamrau has remained unaware.

"Where do you go, during the day?" he asks her one night, the Shogi board again before them. She plays with first one piece, then another, as if toying with which one to move. 

"Some days I go to help my mother in the flower shop, though she thinks I look too thin. Food should not smell so good when I can't have it." Her lips come out in a pout and he laughs, which feels good. 

"Makes seeing Chouji a bit harder," he agrees with that same grim humor. 

"Sometimes," she ventures, moving a piece. "My father is there instead. He gives me a dressing down and tries to send me to the Missions Office."

"What happens then?"

"I leave."

Shikamaru says nothing to that.

"I talk to Chouji, some days, if I can find him. Or Sakura-chan, but she's rarely away from the hospital where-"

"Where Tsunade-sama will be. Her dressing downs are awful."

Ino doesn't laugh like Shikamaru did a minute ago. 

"Yeah," she says. "Exactly."

"Sometimes," she says. "I treat Naruto to ramen."

Shikamaru is rather impressed by this. As a highly valued ninja, Naruto's getting regular missions and regular paychecks with them, but that has not always been the case. Naruto's view of the world is very black and white in a way, Shikamaru has begun to suspect, only an orphan's can be: Good triumphs evil. Friendship always wins. Food is love. For someone who can't eat, it is kind of Ino to give what Naruto will most easily recognize as friendship.

"That's good," he says. "I thought you might-"

"Might think I'd become some monster and be unable to step out the door? I did wonder. How could they not see? How could they not tell? I'm dead. They should notice something!"

Shikamaru reaches his hand out over the board, reaching, not for a playing piece, but for her hand.

"You couldn't tell. About me- you couldn't."

He misses the scar that ran down her palm. She got it when she was eight and had stolen her father's kunai. It healed over when she turned. It is still her hand he is holding though.

"I know," she says, looking down at their hands. Her thumb brushes back and forth against the side of his index finger. "And I thought- you are so good at shogi."

He laughs again, but tension is unabated. "And you thought you'd ask me how to play?"

"You can see 200 moves ahead. Isn't that what they say? Isn't that what Asuma-sensei used to say? So I thought, Shikamaru must surely see. He must. Where is this going?"

Where is the game going? Where is the hand-holding going? Where is their un-life going?

Three guesses as to what Ino means, and the first two don't count. he draws back his hand, leans back in his chair.

"I suppose there are several ways things can go." 

She has a playing piece in her fingers now, and rubs it absently against her lips. 

"We can-uh," She really shouldn't be doing that, he thinks and concentrates some more on all the different scenarios he's played over and over in his head. "We can do nothing. Let things run their course."

"Someone won't notice the two of us, fifty years old still looking all of twenty-two?"

He almost hates to bring it up. He'd rather think of her laughing and talking to their other friends, but she did ask. Shikamaru respects her enough to tell what she has asked. 

"People die, Ino. Shinobi most of all. For awhile we are just aging rather gracefully, and eventually people forget. Was Ino with the genin class from five years ago? Four years ago? It blurs and we stay and serve the city."

"Not enough would die." she says, and it is true. "Kinota-chan died. Nao-chan, Asuma-kun. But- I don't want it to be enough."

"No," he agrees, very quietly. "Me neither."

"We could always tell Naruto," he says into the silence that followed his first plan. "He will be Hokage one day. He's a demon host; he knows what its like to be different and, anyway, no one knows how long a demon host can live, if it is dies of natural causes."

A small smile plays across her lips. "We could be his advisors."

"We'd have to tell everyone though."

They stare into each other's eyes, just a moment, and let that dream drop. 

"My other idea is a fake death, some dangerous mission far away. After that? Travel, maybe."

Shinobi do travel, of course-A mission to kill someone in Iron Country, find a document from the Hidden Sand. Its not a day at the beach, soaking up sunshine though. Ino loves the sunshine, and sure enough the thought brings a smile to her lips. Just for a second though, and she's pushed back her chair, moving to the kitchen for a glass and drink. 

"So what you're saying is, nothing has to happen now."

No. Nothing for years, at least as far as living an eternity goes. Laughing with a friend, working with family, even teaching again- all these things will go on and on. The smallest part of himself that he allows to think of it wonders if Ino will stay with him, if that will happen. He tells himself to forget the moment, forget that thought, dangerous as it is. She smiled tonight, let that be enough for now.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Taste (The Someone Buy Me Roses Mix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/189396) by [Hokuto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/pseuds/Hokuto)




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